Tools of the tech reviewers trade in Texas: iPhones, bullets and guns

Lee Hutchinson is the senior reviews editor for Ars Technica. He lives in Houston, and if you’re a techie, you wish you had his job. He gets to play with cutting edge gadgetry every day, and gets paid for it.

And living in Houston, he’s also a Texan. He likes to shoot guns. So, when a press release arrived in his inbox offering him a smartphone screen protector made out of bulletproof glass, he did what any right-thinking, enterprising, Texas-based tech reviewer would do.

First, though, he attacked the screen protector with slightly more conventional implements – keys, a hammer, a screwdriver … and his car.

The screen protector applied to an iPhone 3GS did a good job of protecting the device’s screen:

The Holy Grail’s tempered bulletproof glass didn’t stand up very long to my screwdriver attack, and further abuse led to further damage. However, there is one extremely important thing to note in the above video: for all the cracking and brokenness of the screen protector, the iPhone’s screen itself is fine. The screen protector absorbs the punishment and fractures, but it saves the iPhone from damage.

Hutchinson then put the second sample on a friend’s iPhone 4 and headed out to a nearby gun range. There, he put the product to the ultimate test with his 9mm Beretta 92FS semi-automatic pistol. In the video below and at the Ars story, you can see the results.

Clearly, this is not something a tech reviewer living in, say, Maryland might do. But in Texas, this is how we roll.